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Tuesday, July 2, 2013

Avraham Berkowitz and NBC's Abuse 'Smear'

Did NBC smear a prominent Chabad rabbi over his position on
reporting child abuse to the police?

The Peacock Network’s ‘Rock Center’ show on June 21 ran a
story about Judy Brown, who has written for the Forward and whose bestselling
book, ‘Hush,’ chronicles her spiritual journey away from the Hasidic world and
discusses sexual abuse in the deeply insular Hasidic community.

Rabbi Avraham Berkowitz, a well-known figure in the Chabad
movement, was interviewed for the story.

Although Berkowitz supports reporting
suspected abuse directly to police, NBC edited his comments to make it seem
that he believes they should only be reported only to rabbis, a controversial
position that has divided the Jewish community.

The transcript of the unedited interview shows that
Berkowitz said “the rabbis work together hand-in-hand with the authorities,”
“deviants must be punished,” and “they’ll be caught.” The full un-aired
interview demonstrates that Berkowitz was discussing educational initiatives on
abuse prevention, not the reporting of sexual abuse — and makes clear that he
believes rabbis should work hand-in-hand with the authorities.

But NBC apparently decided that Berkowitz’s views did not
fit the storyline of Orthodox sexual abuse cover-ups.

So it selectively edited
his quotes and added grossly misleading voice-overs that implied he believes
sex abuse crimes should be handled only by rabbis.

“Avraham Berkowitz is a local rabbi in the community and he
says people are now acknowledging that sexual abuse is happening and insists
that they can handle the problem themselves,” Dr. Nancy Snyderman, of NBC says
on the show.

NBC never directly asked Berkowitz whether he thinks abuse
should be reported directly to the police. Yet they superimposed his unrelated
quotes over a discussion the case of Nechemya Weberman, the unlicensed Satmar
“therapist” who was convicted of sexually abusing a young girl. The Weberman
case, a narrator intones, “was a rare instance of a Hasid going to outside
authorities to report a crime.”

NBC has since pulled the story from its web site and issued
an editor’s note clarifying his comments.

“In the story, (Berkowitz) said ‘the community can handle
the problem themselves,’” the editor’s note says. “Rabbi Berkowitz says he was
referring to the community handling efforts to prevent sexual abuse - not
whether to report sexual abuse to police. He says he has always advocated
reporting suspected abuse to the appropriate law enforcement agencies.”

Berkowitz says he accepts the clarification.

“I’m very grateful to NBC for the steps they took to resolve
the matter,” the rabbi wrote on his Facebook page.

The story behind the story is the big split within the
Orthodox world about whether and how to report child abuse to authorities. That
feud pits those like Berkowitz and Chabad on the side of encouraging reporting
directly to the police, while the Satmars and other Hasidic groups oppose it.

The Chabad-affiliated Bein Din of Crown Heights has even
issued a ruling that required suspected abuse be reported directly to the
police. Chaim Dovid Zwiebel, the executive vice president of Agudath Israel of
America, on the other hand, has said that Jews should not report sexual abuse
allegations to the police unless permitted to do so by a rabbi.

NBC apparently didn’t want to dig too deeply into the story
about divisions within different Hasidic groups, instead focusing on the
headline-grabbing story about their supposed reluctance to go to authorities.

At the end of the day, the ‘Rock Center’ viewers didn’t know
much more this important and divisive issue after watching than they did
before.